Lots of Ink: Huge coverage for a stray remark – and a press release, about going up and never coming down
Down today’s list of posts is some Mars news, about water. Right here is a perfect storm of Mars News that has little to do with science and has little chance of reality, but it manages to push old timey space romance and sci-fi fueled imagination. Hence it went, as they say and is already a tiresome word: viral.
Pete Worden, former Air Force General (fixed from earlier version saying ex-astronaut, of which I knew better but didn’t pay attention to myself) is director of the NASA Ames Research Center. He recently participated in a meeting of the imaginative Long Now Foundation, devoted to deep time and other profundities and energized by visionaries such as Stewart Brand and Ray Kurzweil. I’ve never been to one of their meetings but I bet they are stimulating and fun, if not perhaps consequential.
While there Worden mentioned that NASA has looked into one-way expeditions to Mars. It seems to me I’ve heard about this idea before. An agency could save money, time, fuel, and headaches if people going to Mars did not insist on being able to come back to show everybody their slides.
It was a perfect storm. A week or so ago a blogger, Amara D. Angelica, at the Kurzweil web site noted Worden’s remarks. At about the same time an article in the Journal of Cosmology, by an author there and by well-known writer and astronomer Paul Davies at Arizona State, described exactly the same kind of mission. See Grist, below, for link to entire Mars-related issue with many papers.
Thus, this month, there has arisen with hardly any organized press campaigns a monster news splash over speculation on nothing new. Even DARPA, if you believe these stories, is in on the act. Fox News ran a picture of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. That’s appropriate.
Take a look:
- Wired – Tim Carmody: NASA Developing Tech to Reach and Colonize Other Worlds ;
- Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: Could a Human Mars Mission Be Funded Commercially? : This was posted Oct 7, and Atkinson treated the one-way idea as old news for a feature. But she does have the wit to refer to publication of info “in the somewhat dubious Journal of Cosmology,” a construction which literally means the opposite of the clear implication: this journal’s editors ought to be MORE dubious.
- Fox News – John Brandon: Is NASA Covering Up the 100-Year Starship ; Wotta story. File it under fiction.
- MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: Billionaires wanted for starship plan ; Boyle, being a veteran of this beat, rightly turns from this news to insert assurance that these ideas are old hat.
- Atlantic Wire – Max Fisher: Should We Colonize Mars … One-Way? ;
- Wired Science UK ; Duncan Geere: The case for a one-way manned mission to Mars ;
Grist for the Mill:
Journal of Cosmology article To Boldly Go: A One-Way Mission .. (by the way, the whole issue is devoted to Mars colonization papers).
Washington St. Univ Press Release (via EurekAlert!)
- Charlie Petit
November 1st, 2010 at 1:45 pm
Just a small correction: Pete Worden is not an ex-astronaut. He is an ex Air Force general who formerly led the US Space Command and was responsible for the DC-X rocket prototype that helped inspire the new generation of suborbital tourist spacecraft. He’s also been a prominent advocate of more research on potentially hazardous asteroids and comets. But he has no astronaut wings.
November 1st, 2010 at 5:50 pm
Thanks DAvid. This is a lesson to myself and anybody else who writes something and makes a mental note to check it. Don’t make the note, make the fact check. Placeholders are like land mines.